Description

Using Yelp’s API, Date Idea Generator pulls in local restaurants, parks, cafes, bars, and more to randomize dates. Once a user has provided their location and time, they can randomize their results by shaking their phone or pressing the space bar. If they like a location, they can lock it in. If one of their results is close, but not perfect, they can lock it in by category.

The Problem

Date Idea Generator was made for people who feel stuck in a rut.

If you’ve ever brainstormed with a romantic partner about what to do on a Friday night, but decided to watch Netflix instead, then you understand exactly why we decided to build Date Idea Generator. Having experienced many weekends like this, we felt that too many options leads to indecision, which leads to another weekend spent binge-watching House of Cards.

To combat this, our site only displays up to three random options at once. Instead of planning out a date from the ground up, you lock in locations one at a time. Because the locations are randomized, and there is no back button, Date Idea Generator encourages people to step outside of their comfort zone.

Planning

As a group, we decided that randomizing the locations should be as easy as pressing a button, so we found a lot of inspiration from the color palette generator Coolors.co. We spent a decent amount of the planning period exploring possible sources of our date location info. Eventually, we decided on Yelp’s new Fusion v3 API.

At first, we considered having users create accounts, but we eventually agreed that our site should be as easy to use as possible and that memorizing another password might be a barrier to our site’s usability.

User Stories

Here are some user stories that motivated the website.

Allison and Kate

• Allison (20) and Kate (21) are students who met in college and have been dating for two years
• As a long-term couple, Allison and Kate want to go to new date locations, so they can bring excitement into their dating life
• Because they are busy college students, they want to be able to share the ideas they encounter on our site easily with each other via text

Kim and Aaron

• Kim (33) and Aaron (35) are professionals who have a regular date night every Friday
• As a relatively new couple, Kim and Aaron want to explore new things together that push them out of their comfort zone rather than another movie night, so they need a tool that will give them varied ideas for their dates
• Because they are professionals, they want their dates to fit well into their work schedules

Outcomes

Date Idea Generator was presented to a group of 20 web development students who were beta users of the app.

Next Steps

• Build a mobile app
• Add new custom filters
• Make time estimates more granular